2024 Iran–Israel conflict #2

The best AD leaks like a sieve?

There are tiny cameras these days . They are the size of your small finger nail . They could be dropped by drone , and transmit . Photo of air activity , pointing upwards . Better than satellites

Not better than satellites. The batteries would only last a short time and any bit of dirt or dust on those tiny lenses and you can't see anything.

The most obvious problem of course is those cameras are designed to operate in a WiFi setup and do not have powerful long range transmitters... but even if they did their transmissions of data would reveal their locations to the enemy who can go out and find them and take them or just stomp them into the ground... or better yet... turn them upside down.

Having a custom designed recon package that can be positioned and recovered might be a good idea... making it disposable means cheaper lower quality components... making it reusable means more expensive to make but cheaper to use because you can use it over and over.

You could make a device that looks like a rock and position it half way up a mountain with an incredibly powerful magnification camera attached.

I remember looking at a Russian site about 3-4 years ago that had their enormous megapixel cameras that enabled a photo to be taken of a city where you could zoom in the image to individual windows in sky scrapers in the middle distance.

The purpose of the enormous megapixel rating of the camera is to allow you to zoom in on specific areas without them becoming pixelated and blocky.

They had another camera with a decent pixel rating but an enormously powerful zoom lens... it sounds amazing and it is for very specific jobs, but for some jobs it is useless.

Think of it like trying to assemble a 10,000 piece jigzaw puzzle while looking only through a straw...

If you are up in a mountain and you want to monitor activity in a specific area of a town or city nearby it would be ideal but trying to keep tabs on everything around the mountain would mean you have a ridiculously enormous volume of space to search.

This is the sort of situation were more than one camera makes sense... even a thermal camera with a wide angle and a zoom that can be used to find things of interest... ie hotspots, and then you can use your powerful camera to zoom in and have a close look.

Equivalent to the idea of an IRST which can scan enormous volumes of airspace looking for hotspots of interest which you can then turn your radar towards to examine properly.

The IRST and thermal camera are passive and can be used to cover large areas quickly and targets of interest like people attract attention in certain climactic conditions... like cold days. You could even use a normal wide angle camera with an AI programme to search for and highlight moving objects in the field of view to detect things of interest.

Isos wrote:It's quite surprising to see US arm Taiwan and Ukraine to the teeths and Russia and China not arming Iran.

Iran does not need Lend-Lease. They can buy weapons with their own funds from energy exports.

I think the actions of the west and the US have probably changed the way Russia and China will do business moving forward, and I suspect if they think a country needs help against the EU or US then they will provide that help.

This is not new, they are talking to the Taliban and they also warned Erdogan about plans to overthrow him a few years back before the Ukraine conflict.

With western support to Kiev in finding targets in Russia and assisting with terrorist attacks I am sure Russia will certainly be more interested in providing assistance to countries like Iran and North Korea... not just military assistance, but also economic assistance to bypass western sanctions and allow both countries to develop and grow their economies too.

There have been a few reports of Iran launching satellites and having Russia launch satellites for them, and of course Russia is launching more recon satellites all the time too so the amount of information they can share is only going to increase over time and that is a positive for both sides.

I rather suspect Trump withdrew from the agreement with Iran for the very reason that it did not stop them creating space launchers to launch satellites and a better view from space of the region might give them access to information that Israel doesn't want them to know.

The agreement with Iran was to allow the US and Israel to identify all their nuclear facilities and important people so they can be destroyed or killed respectively when needed. They played the same game with Saddam, where the IAEA were used to try to track Saddam for the purposes of murdering him... it failed horribly.

The misuse and abuse of international organisations by the west in general and the US in particular is the main reason for countries getting behind BRICS and starting the process of replacing these misused and abused organisations for something that actually serves the people of the world rather than a few rich people in the US.

Private satellite companies only get to do business with US/CIA permission... try to get high resolution images of sensitive places in the US or Israel... it is simply not available and if it is it will be edited.

The Russians have their own satellites and get the raw data which is rather more useful than a finished image that could have been modified/edited.